“India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge” by S Kalyanaraman

The late S Kalyanaraman was one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers until his untimely death in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19. He worked as a research fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. His last book, India’s Military Strategy, concisely explains and assesses the evolution of India’s military strategy towards Pakistan as manifested in their repeated clashes between 1947 and the early 21st century.

Kalyanaraman approaches India’s military strategy from a solid grounding in the strategic thought of Clausewitz, Jomini, Delbruck, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Billy Mitchell, Liddell Hart, Fuller, Brodie and Schelling, among others. There are references sprinkled throughout the book to the writings of Edward Luttwak, Hew Strachan, Theodore Ropp, John Mearsheimer, Ashley Tellis, and Geoffrey Till. And he does not neglect the strategic thinking of Indian scholars such as K Subrahmanyam, Arjun Subramaniam, Jasit Singh, Sandeep Unnithan, and Vijay Sakhuja. His framework for analysis is three-pronged: policy, strategy, and doctrine:

 

Policy determines the political aims to be attained. Strategy translates political aims into military objectives, determines the form of war (defensive or offensive) to be waged, and evolves an overall plan for the application of military force. Doctrine governs how the armed services apply force to attain the military goals flowing from the overall military objectives.

 

India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge, S Kalyanaraman (Bloomsbury, February 2024)
India’s Military Strategy: Countering Pakistan’s Challenge, S Kalyanaraman (Bloomsbury Academic India, December 2023; Bloomsbury, February 2024)

Kalyanaraman distinguishes between doctrines for land warfare, naval warfare, and air warfare. In a democracy like India’s, civilians set the policy, while strategy and doctrine are formulated and implemented in a collaborative manner by political and military leaders. Ideally, policy provides the guidance for strategy and doctrine, Kalyanaraman understood, however, that strategy and doctrine can influence policy formation.

The India-Pakistan rivalry has its roots in British imperialism, religious divisions, and geopolitical competition. Kalyanaraman writes that the rivalry has been sustained by “three inter-related factors…: incompatible conceptions of national identity, Pakistan’s quest for parity with India, and the conflict over ‘Kashmir’”. He provides charts to show the evolution of the shifting military balance over seven decades of conflict. And he places the India-Pakistan rivalry within the context of domestic politics in India and Pakistan, India’s territorial disputes with China, the US-Soviet Cold War, the South Asian nuclear stalemate, and the post-Cold War struggle with jihadist terrorism.

Kalyanaraman separates India’s military strategy towards Pakistan into three phases: a strategy of exhaustion from 1950 to 1970 in which India strove for “strategic success” with the goal of achieving a favorable balance of power with Pakistan; a strategy of annihilation in the 1971 war which resulted in the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh; and a strategy of limited war against a nuclear-armed Pakistan, which carried over into the post-Cold War struggle against Pakistani-supported jihadists.

 

The author devotes chapters to what he calls the “half-war” of 1947-48, which resulted from “the catastrophic communal violence unleashed by the division of Punjab into Indian and Pakistani portions”, which spawned disputes over Junagadh, Hyderabad, and especially Jammu and Kashmir—the latter state which shares borders with both countries; the 1951 crisis over Jammu and Kashmir, which shaped India’s force structure in the 1950s; the 1965 clash of arms which began as a dispute over the Rann of Kutch and expanded thereafter; the 1971 fighting in East Pakistan in the midst of Pakistan’s civil war; the 1999 Kargil War (again involving Jammu and Kashmir); and the struggle against jihadists based in Pakistan which continues to this day.

Kalyanaraman was not confident that the sources of the India-Pakistan rivalry would go away, so he counseled India’s leaders to strengthen the strategy of limited war, which has a precise and limited objective and is fought with limited means in a confined geographical region. It sounds so simple, but as Clausewitz noted, even the simplest things in war are difficult.


Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.